Make your money work for you!

Month: September 2015

Fascinating times seem to be waiting ahead in Bondora, but so far I’ve decided not to react much. Overall I’ve reduced the monthly amounts I invest into Bondora a bit (from 200-ish down to ~100€), and it’s already showing its impact in terms of the ratio of defaulted loans in my portfolio.

Due to the fact that I’ve reduced new funds, then the % of overdue and 60+ overdue loans has started to grow quite a bit. Most days the ‘current’ floats at about 70%, and it’s slowly losing ground to problematic loans. Not sure if that’s signs of a recession yet, or just the rebalancing, but soon my 60+ defaulted loans will reach 1000€, which is undoubtedly a bit painful to look at!

While I’ve been getting a bit of recovery here and there in the form in principal payments, then interest earned has kinda stumbled to a stop. This month it didn’t manage to pass the 100€ marker, remaining at 99,09€. Hopefully next month I’ll be back over 100€, but any growth seems problematic due to the constant influx of defaults.

As you can see, then looking at the older months of investments, then the green in some of them will start to lose out to the red of defaulted loans. Since my first investments are now more than 2,5 years old, then it’s time to start drawing some conclusions, since just a while back Q1 of 2013 has hit break-even. (Meaning interest earned > outstanding principal.)

Recovery wise it was an OK month. While the chart shows +1 loan fully recovered (Stage 5), then at the end of the month another loan was fully recovered and is probably waiting to be manually market into the 5th stage.

Since the numbers might seem somewhat pessimistic, then just to show that the case isn’t that bad, I updated my returns calculations, and while the pessimistic rate of return looks, well, pessimistic, then overall the numbers are fine. Also, since long term returns are slowly dropping, then a moderate 13-14% is perfectly fine as a long term return.

Overall I’m looking forward to what exactly Bondora is planning to do with all their new changes. Until then I’ll keep my strategy of slightly smaller monthly contributions and then maybe readjust depending on what’s the final product that they’re going to serve to investors.